Don’t Say a Word
By Lisa Von Drasek

Tuesday by David Wiesner (Clarion, 1991, ISBN: 0-395-55113-7) is an award-winning wordless story about frogs levitating on their lily pads and zooming through a community.

Wordless books are ones in which the story is told through illustrations and the story creates an opportunity for teachers to engage in a multitude of literacy activities. You can read aloud to young children, who participate by interpreting the pictures with their own storytelling. There's no right answer, so there can be many versions of the story. Beginning writers can create dialogue and label quotations using sticky-notes.

Books without text support literary curriculum goals by allowing students to identify plot, character and context. Students of a diversity of skill and age levels can benefit from unraveling a sequence of events. Struggling readers will find success in creating their own stories to pair with pictures.

A unique format
Ava is a four-year-old at our school who's had early intervention work for speech and language in her one through three years. Her mom reported that Ava really enjoyed Jack and the Missing Piece by Pat Schories (Front Street, 2004 ISBN: 1-932-42517-9). Emergent readers will joyfully "read aloud" from these understandable pictures in which a dog is blamed for a lost part of a building set. Reading partners will take pleasure in identifying with the characters and uncovering the ultimate culprit.

Middle-schoolers also can benefit from this unique format. Tom Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (Dial, 1995, ISBN: 0-803-71804-7) is a heart-wrenching depiction of enslaved Africans' journey from their homelands to the unknown. The 64 black-and-white paintings provide an emotional immediacy that would be rare from an ordinary social studies text.

Terrific wordless picks
Sidewalk Circus presented by Paul Fleischman is illustrated by Kevin Hawkes (Candlewick, 2004, ISBN: 0-763-61107-7). A young girl is waiting for a bus on main street and begins to imagine that ordinary workers represent circus performers. A man delivering a load of beef to the butcher is a strong man. Two boys fooling on skateboards shadow clowns, a chef flipping a pancake while performing feats of juggling are among the images portrayed.

Jeannie Baker was one of the first to create textless picture book for older children with her book Window (Greenwillow, 1991, ISBN: 0-688-08918-6). The 13 two-page spreads created in three dimensional collage, show a window and through that window, the negative changes to the environment over time. Her new book Home (Greenwillow, 2004, ISBN: 0-066-23935-4) continues in her signature collage style using a combination of materials, paint, plaster, clay and natural- feathers, moss and bark telling the story of a neighborhood reclaimed over time. For more information on this Australian artist and technique go to her website www.jeanniebaker.com

The bibliography of Mitsumasa Anno, a master of wordless storytelling with the classics, includes Anno's Journey (Putnam, 1997, ISBN: 0-698-11433-7) and Anno's USA (Philomel, 1983, ISBN: 0-399-20974-3). He does not disappoint with his most recent tale, Anno's Spain (Philomel, 2004, ISBN: 0-399-24238-4), in which he provides detailed pen and ink panoramic adventure across historic, present day and fictional Spain.

From the tradition of Anno comes a search-and-find exploration, The Yellow Balloon by Charlotte Dematons (Front Street, 2004, ISBN: 1-932-42501-2). We follow a small yellow balloon around the world in 17 aerial landscape paintings. Close observers can find a multitude of remarkable details – in just one double-page spread, which looks like a modern seashore resort community – we can also see a tiny shipwreck on a rock where resides a mermaid, a man on a flying carpet sailing off a cliff near a lighthouse, and tucked near a modest campground is a circus tent complete with an elephant and giraffe.

Using simple lines and soft water color, guache paintings, Barbara Lehman constructs a sweet fantasy of a book in The Red Book (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, ISBN: 0-618-42858-8). A young girl walking on a city street finds a red book peeking out of a snowbank. She gazes into one of the pages and sees a map, then a tropical island. There is a figure walking on a beach and as we look closer, we see a boy. He finds a red book, one corner not covered in sand. He peers into a picture of a city, closer and closer he sees the girl looking at a book, looking at him!

For more wordless book picks, check out www.lfpl.org/kidspages/booklists/wordless.htm from the Louisville Free Public Library or www.weberpl.lib.ut.us/booklists/books.php?BookListID=31&SortOrder=Author from Utah's Weber County Library. An extra wordless book searching tip – most library catalogs will give you a list if the phrase "Stories without words" is entered. Happy reading!

Lisa Von Drasek is Children's Librarian at the School for Children, Bank Street College of Education, in New York, NY.